Meltdown & Spectre: Apple Confirms All Macs & iPhones Are Vulnerable To Chip Bug

Steve McCaskill,
Intel

Apple releases mitigations for Mac, iPhone and iPad and says a Safari fix is incoming as Meltdown and Spectre continue to plague technology industry

Apple has confirmed all Mac and iOS devices, such as iPhones and iPads, are vulnerable to the industry-wide processor vulnerabilities disclosed earlier this week.

Essentially, the vulnerabilities affect the kernel of the chips and could allow an attacker to read information that should otherwise be inaccessible. This means an attacker could obtain passwords, encryption keys or steal information from other applications.

Chips made by Intel, AMD and ARM manufacturers are all affected, meaning all manner of devices are implicated. 

Intel

Apple Meltdown Spectre

The company said it had released mitigations for ‘Meltdown’ and ‘Spectre’ in iOS 11.2, macOS macOS 10.13.2, and tvOS 11.2 and would continue to work on future mitigations. Apple Watch devices are not affected and Apple also plans to release a fix for Safari in the next few days.

It added that it had no information on any known exploits at the current time.

Would you use a smart speaker such as Amazon Echo or Google Home in the Workplace?

View Results

Loading ... Loading ...

Microsoft has already issued an emergency patch for Windows 10, while Google has urged Android users to upgrade to the latest security update.

Public cloud providers, including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and Microsoft Azure have also issued guidance to customers in what is arguably an unprecedented incident for the technology industry.

Quiz: What do you know about ARM Holdings?